Today the director of Sunlight Labs, Tom Lee, will be speaking at a Sunshine Week event hosted by OpenTheGovernment.org and the Center for American Progress. Tom will evaluate the current state of transparency and the role of technology in advancing open government. He is joined on the second panel by Jennifer LaFleur, the director of Computer-Assisted Reporting at ProPublica, Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and Todd Park, the chief technology office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The day will look at the practical applications of transparency initiatives - a mix of policy and technical considerations. The event is full of familiar faces in the transparency world and will be webcast live with an opportunity for all viewers to submit questions (and on CSPAN).
The role technology can play in streamlining the declassification process was the topic of a Public Interest Declassification Board meeting on Thursday, Sept. 23. The PIDB is an congressionally-established advisory committee that works to facilitate public access to national security-related records. It is considering how to advise agencies on their efforts to declassify approximately 410 million pages of records by December 2013. An agenda for the meeting is available here [PDF].
The Board heard presentations on the feasibility of using an automated computer systems to streamline document review. The speakers were Jeff Jonas from IBM, Tom Lee from the Sunlight Foundation, and John Verdi from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Jeff Jonas outlined a hypothetical automated system that would tag documents based on key words and phrases to make predictions about whether a document should be declassified. A high level of accuracy would come from training the system on documents that have already been reviewed, combined with determining how the new document relates to the old information, in a process known as "context accumulation." He analogizes context accumulation to solving a jigsaw puzzle in this blogpost. The technology already exists, but would take some time to implement.
Tom Lee described the requirements for determining whether a document should be declassified, focusing on how a computer system could help prioritize the work queues of reviewers. For example, pages that the system determines most likely to be sensitive can be reviewed first, and if the system is determined to have made a correct judgment, the rest of the document (and potentially the document series) can be removed from the work queue. A search algorithm could be trained to return sophisticated results that would give human reviewers a clear indication of the content of a given document. Such a system would involve a static up-front cost, with additional computational costs varying on the system's operational speed.
John Verdi approached the issue from a policy perspective, explaining his evaluation of what transparency groups and the public want from a declassification process. He suggested that the preparation of unclassified summaries adds work without adding much public value and is an unnecessary burden on the declassification process. In his opinion, resources would be better spent reviewing entire documents and declassifying whenever possible. He also discussed a few transparency tools that many hope to see, such as a large, openly-accessible searchable database of declassified records.
The Board has another meeting scheduled for Nov. 9, 2010 to further investigate ways to facilitate declassification.
Declassification has been a current focus in Congress as legislators promote a cultural shift from “need to know” to “need to share.” Just last week, Congress sent the "Reducing Over-Classification Act," H.R. 553, to the President for his signature. Among other things, the legislation requires the Director of National Intelligence to establish policies and procedures to identify the classification of portions of information within an intelligence product, hopefully thereby facilitating automated review.
We summarized a July 22 discussion of the declassification of historical congressional records here.
Today, May 8th, marks the 125th birthday of Harry S Truman, our 33rd president. He once said, "Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix." Amen, Mr. President.
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Monday morning, Tom Lee, a technology director at Sunlight, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” taking questions about Recovery.gov, the Web site set up to track spending under the federal government’s economic stimulus program. Tom is working on SubsidyScope, a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, that looks at the role of federal subsidies in the economy. Below is the video of the segment:
Speaking of Recovery.gov, Matt Kelley with USA Today reported that the Web site won't have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program. Kelley quotes Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief evangelist, saying people accustomed to getting easily searchable information quickly could be frustrated. "If we have to wait until October to get the information or to the end of the year to get a powerful recovery.gov site, the Obama administration will have missed an important opportunity."
Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, in an op-ed titled "Ways to Protect Our Democracy," highlights the work of Sunlight and Sunlight Labs, and mentions the Apps for America contest. Vanden Heuvel quotes Gabriela Schneider, "This is the next generation of civic engagement…We see it as a way to revitalize democracy. The transparency work is a catalyst for the greater democracy reform movement."
The U.S. Senate announced this week that it was going to start publishing roll call votes in XML, an online format that’s easily reusable by other programs. XML allows the data to be manipulated and organized in such a way that public interest groups can get a much more thorough picture of Senate voting patterns. In writing about the move, the Politico’s Victoria McGrane quoted John Wonderlich, Sunlight's policy director, as saying the Senate’s decision was “spectacular.” The Examiner newspapers editorialized that the move signals the Senate had finally joined the 21st Century. As encouraging and important as this step by the Senate is, I’d hold off on that designation until senators start disclosing campaign finance data online and in a timely manner.
Jeanne Cummings at the Politico wrote about “lobbyist contact” disclosures posted on government department and agency Web sites. She made note of a review conducted by Paul Blumenthal, Sunlight’s senior writer, that found only 14 of a possible 29 departments and agencies have created Web pages to disclose lobbyist inquiries. On March 20, President Obama issued a memo to all agencies involved with the distribution of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requiring them to disclose all communications between lobbyists and agency officials. John Fritze with USA Today wrote that Obama’s effort to make lobbying more transparent has shed little light on the behind-the-scenes, special-interests lobbying thus far. He quotes Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, "We're looking to have more disclosure, not less. If this was supposed to give us more disclosure, why is it that you're not seeing lobbyist communications?"
Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein profiled Lisa Rosenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, terming her "K Street's worst nightmare" and "the lobbyist lobbyists hate." He wrote that Lisa is "not your average influence peddler," but does the "unthinkable" by lobbying for more oversight and regulation of lobbying. Stein quotes Lisa, "I have no friends...My lobbyist colleagues are cringing at the things that I do."
Joshua Zumbrun at Forbes.com wrote about six ways Uncle Sam can help rescue newspapers. One of his proposals is for the government to help ease newspapers into nonprofit status, citing the Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity as examples of nonprofit organizations that are already making an impact.
